State Senator Scott Brown, the Republican candidate for US Senate, endorsed yesterday the use of enhanced interrogation techniques – including the practice of simulated drowning known as waterboarding – in questioning terror suspects.

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Brown, in response to a question, told reporters that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a passenger jet en route to Detroit on Christmas Day, should be treated as an enemy combatant, taken to the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, interrogated “pursuant to our rules of engagement and laws of war,’’ and not be treated as a civilian criminal suspect. Brown asserted that waterboarding does not constitute torture, but he did not specifically say Abdulmutallab should be subjected to waterboarding.

Here is what Scott Brown said about Joseph Stack, the Texas man who torched his house and then flew his plane into a building that contains several agencies of the Federal government, killing at least two people besides himself, after having left a blisteringly anti-government manifesto online on his website for all to read:

… I don’t know if it’s related, but I can just sense not only in my election, but since being here in Washington, people are frustrated. They want transparency, they want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things that are affecting their daily lives. So I’m not sure that there’s a connection, I certainly hope not. But we need to do things better.

Cavuto: Um, you know invariably people are going to look at this and say, well, that’s where some of this populist rage gets you. [At this point, footage of the building IRS building in Austin appears on the right of the screen.] Isn’t that a bit extreme?

Brown: Well, yeah, of course it’s extreme. You don’t know anything about the individual. He could have had other issues, certainly. No one likes paying taxes, obviously. But the way we’re trying to deal with things and have been in the past, at least until I got here is, there’s such a logjam in Washington. And people want us to do better. They want us to help solve the problems that are affecting Americans in a very real way.

[Here, the display zooms back to just Cavuto and Brown.]

And I think we, I’m hopeful that we can do that, with a lot of the things that are coming forward. At least what I’m hearing through, and speaking with my colleagues this seems to be a diff feel there’s kind of a message that was sent with my election, the fact that I was elected by a substantial margin taking the former Ted Kennedy’s seat. They want difference up here and I’m hopeful that’s going to happen.

Notice the difference here? It would seem that it comes down to skin color: